funny (if not necessarily "passive-aggressive") notes from pissed-off people

Welcome to “Real America”

Reports Barb in Las Vegas: “A woman in our office, originally from the Philippines, just got her citizenship. Our often inappropriate receptionist wrote this note on her card.”

Yes, that really does say “no more climbing over barbed wire in the nite.” Adds Barb: “She also printed lyrics from West Side Story in giant font and hung them in the area where we had celebratory cake. So odd!”

Like one of those Tea Party people.
Maybe in haste to be first, Jack overlooked the optimal
“Like many of those Tea Party people.”

If you dispute the assertion that many of the Tea Party members (including the foot soldiers carrying the posters showing Obama with either watermelons or swastikas, not just the sanitized officer corps that show up on TV) are racist and are being manipulated by old school GOP operators of today in much the same way the “Silent Majority” of Nixon’s time was hypnotized into acquiescence by fears of school busing, well, maybe you’re too young to remember or to have even been alive in the late 1960′s, or maybe you know a bunch of non-racist Tea Party people, but I was there for Nixon, and when all but one of the Tea Party people I know say “We want our country back!”, I know them well enough to know that they mean a white-dominated country in which other people know their place and stay in it.

If you’re asking me, then at least a couple dozen, maybe 30-35.
Admittedly, my experience is likely very different from yours, as I have lived in Costa Rica for almost 3 years and most of my Tea Partiers are expat gringos like me. The juicy part for me, irony wise, is they want to “take our country back” but aren’t interested in living in it anytime soon. Imagine middle-to-slightly-upper-middle-class retirees who never had the wealth or even income to afford human domestic help (aka servants) in the States, but who feel the need, and have the time, to go on ad nauseum about how stupid their maid or gardener is. Maybe someday one or more of them will return to the USA, like Lenin taking the train from Switzerland to Russia, to take the reins and “begin to set things right”.
But that’s more of a pipe dream than a long shot.

This may be one of the most effed up PANs I’ve seen of late. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be pissed. The anger really came to a boiling point when I saw the second photo. Write anything you want as long as it’s not in Comic Sans! *shudder*

Hard to imagine, but the lyrics could have been worse. How? Well, she could have selected this part of the song:
“Here you are free and you have pride – Long as you stay on your own side!
Free to be anything you choose – Free to wait tables and shine shoes!”

I don’t think the written note could possibly have been more offensive though. WOW.

@#5.2, only by blind people who are unaware that the Philippines were once part of the Spanish Empire, so many Filipinos have Spanish names (Marcos, Aquino).
Sighted people can usually tell the difference quite easily.

I agree, after a while it’s nice to be called Miss instead of Missus or Ma’am on account of looking old. Sigh… But when I was younger I would have dudes looking down my shirt at work (impressive for a fast food joint patron, even) which was yucky.

Seriously. That was my first thought: “This person is your receptionist?”

When someone calls the office and happens to have an accent, does she start talking like Speedy Gonzales/Apu/Stephen Colbert’s Ching Chong Ding Dong — whichever fake stereotyped accent is completely inappropriate?

The note on the card seems really offensive but I doubt this woman was actually being malicious or intending any offense. She is just incredibly culturally myopic and no doubt considers having an American passport the single greatest advantage a person could ever possess. The chances of her ever having visited another continent are practically zero. So not ‘racist’ as such, just a fool.

OTOH, if her reputation for ‘inappropriateness’ is deserved, then she may just be an asberger’s sufferer in desperate need of a diagnosis. They aren’t all awkward computer nerds, after all.

I am the submitter, and unfortunately, it was not a joke. While she does make statements like this on a somewhat regular basis, (referred to a guest as “Oriental” the other day) I tend to agree with your analysis. That & she’s too lazy to think before she speaks/writes.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to be sitting too close to this person at work on a regular basis…Imagine this is a mortgage brokerage office, where these days there are often some seriously disgruntled customers. Someone desperate & vengeful comes in looking to spray a few bouquets of Uzi pixie dust before catching the last train home, she’s just the kind of person that might have made a bad first impression. Bad scene, bad odds.

I’ve known people like this, and I agree that it likely was not intended to be racist or any sort of malicious insult, even though it reads like one. They’re just socially clueless and/or ignorant. (Or is a little on the autistic spectrum as Neil suggested).

That said, since she is a receptionist and the public face of the group she works for, somebody should sit her down for a good talking to on what is a appropriate for the workplace and what is not.

This reminds me of a friend of mine in High School. I’m a Canadian, and I was living in Florida as a dependent of my dad’s visa. An alien, but not illegal. If we were walking to class together, and we were running late and had to hurry up, she’d regularly yell at me “run, run like you’re running across the border!”. Funny thing is, one day I hurried around a corner and ran into two military recruiters with her yelling that behind me.

2nd, I find it really funny as well (I’m latino), but it would maybe more appropriate in a personal not work card if you had a jokey relationship with the person. I’m not one to be easily offended though.

Well, my wife and I have been married for 12 years now, and she’s an actual Filipina from the actual Philippines. As an experiment, I showed this to her cold without explanation to get her reaction. She didn’t understand the “West Side Story” reference at all (as neither one of us is a big fan of musicals), but the note caused her to roll her eyes, then laugh. So, at least one actual native of the Philippines was not horribly offended by this act of complete stupidity. On the other hand, I can’t imagine having a receptionist like this greeting and interacting with large numbers of the public if she is so clueless about offending them. I’m not sure “sensitivity training” would sink in, so maybe a transfer into the back office, if she has bookkeeping or other skills?

Also, all of the slamming of the Tea Party really gets trite after awhile. I’m not a member, but some of you seem about as obsessed with them (needlessly) as Perez Hilton is about the Kardashians. It’s just…pointless and not really in context here, except you think they’re all racist. Yeah, whatever.

Yep, I’d seriously advise you to start obsessing over Kim K.’s huge butt instead. It would be more productive. I’ll bet you just love the Occupy Wall Street guys, but then again they’ve produced random shootings, a guy who told the crowd to firebomb Macy’s in NYC, and idiots who throw feces and blood on merchants who won’t give them free food. There’s a reason the polls show the public turning against both the Tea Party & the OWS movement. We need some sensible, pragmatic politics from the middle–for a change.

Sorry, I don’t get the reference to Perez Hilton & the Kardashians.
I try to keep up with popular ‘culture’, but I must have been studying for the final exam in Deconstructing the Anarchist Cookbook in a post-Glenn Beckian Paradigm, or Are There Too Many Nazi References in My Soup at my local radical-left-dominated college and missed that whole arc.

“Hey, Bob, I’ve got a great one… terror babies! You think they’ll buy it?”
Brad, you ignorant slut…of course they’ll buy it !
They bought two terms of Dubya didn’t they ?
And that was after 8 years of that other corporate mega-shill.

With Gutenberg we led them by the nose…with Marconi, by the ear.
Now we got pictures on screens to make ‘em believe that if they buy our bullshit they’re the sane ones and that anyone who doesn’t is crazy,
so you see now…we really got ‘em by the nuts.

Terror babies…piece of cake, Bubba.
They’ll come around faster than you can say Field of Dreams

Seriously, you guys have both been guests on Alex Jones’s show or “Coast to Coast AM” (right after the latest fellow who had a close encounter with bigfoot), right? I love the foolish paranoia, where you claim that the “mainstream media” is creating anti-OWS propaganda, when the OWS mob were instead virtually lionized at the beginning in sources like the “The New York Times” and “The Los Angeles Times.” Some of the negative activities of the more lunatic members of the OWS have also received coverage in foreign sources, such as “The Guardian” and “The Independent,” both of which are a far cry content-wise from Rupert Murdoch’s little amusing stable of media funnies. No, of course, it’s a CONSPIRACY, if you see or hear any negative coverage about these noble workers who have risen up against oppression.

Look, Mulder and Kolchak, I don’t have time for this crap, and, apparently, neither does the majority of the American public. Thank gosh, we might actually not have far-right Republican idealogues or far-left Democrat idealogues running the show, but a few politicans who could actually compromise about something, To paraphrase Voltaire, a party hack’s a fool in any era.

If I might remind you, you’re the one who said with a straight face that people you don’t like are “throw[ing]… blood on merchants who won’t give them free food”. Just a moment or two of thought would make most people backtrack from that kind of assertion, but instead you double down and try to infer that those who find it unlikely must be crazy conspiracy theorists?

Thumbs up for the unwitting humor, but your self-awareness leaves a little to be desired.

I think this is funny. The comment & lyrics are obviously meant humorously, and they are funny. It depends on the vibe of the workplace as to whether or not it’s work-appropriate, but if no one says anything, it’s 100% kosher. I’d say the joke is on the submitter & PANotes for not having a sense of humor about the damn thing!

Sorry to disappoint, but she did not mean to be funny. She’s just a clueless jerk. Our inaction to her behaviour (based quite frankly on initial shock) has led to tacit approval & at this point it would be a major HR nightmare to start any kind action toward her dismissal. Additionally, I don’t have the authority to start the process.

It’s actually a really cool event to celebrate someone gaining US citizenship. I love it. I used to go to a doughnut shop where the owners were from Laos and were very proud to be american. They had pro-US stuff all over the shop. I love that.

My mom picked more than, over, above 100 lbs. of cotton only once. It was the needle on the scale which passed the 100 lbs mark as it measured her performance in terms of pounds of picked cotton produced.

Considering the overwhelmingly large difference in product density (pounds of picked cotton produced), the cotton in question being so much, well, fluffier…then if just getting 100 lbs. was the goal,
I wonder why she didn’t walk on over and pick at Peter Piper Farms.
The acerbic atmosphere there maybe ?
Those rumors of workers getting tipsy from sampling the pick(l)ings ?
Minds peckish for more information want to know.
But please spare me the technical jargon…
it’s a little like corn for me…in one ear etc.
Cause what I don’t know about dry measure would fill volumes.

I’m intrigued. The more I think about this, the more I think the card and the West Side Story lyrics are a really sweet gesture. I’m a non-American living and working in America, and if I got citizenship, and someone responded like this, I’d be touched. Is this a cultural thing? I’m from a country where irony is employed extensively and a card like this would be considered rather *more* thoughtful than a card that simply said, say, “Congratulations on becoming an American! Welcome to the club!” This isn’t a criticism of America, just a comment that there’s cultural variation in the use of irony (including within countries like the US), and that people might well be missing the secretary’s point in a way that it wouldn’t have been missed in a different context. Of course, that implies that she probably misjudged her audience, but there you go…

That’s an interesting take, especially from the non-citizen point of view. Maybe I’m jaded because I grew up in SoCal and anyone brown is an illegal immigrant, so I tend to be suspicious. I would buy that the West Side Story references might be Glee related, though.

Really? Being a product of Japanese immigrants, it bothers me when someone writes ignorant and derogatory messages like that since I’ve had my share of being bullied and told that I would be deported back in grade school. This receptionist seriously needs training on what’s appropriate and inappropriate in social and workplace situations and get on with the times.

I feel you. I immigrated with my mom and grandparents from Moscow when I was 7, and people would make comments regarding our status all the time. Natural-born Americans don’t realize that it takes years to get citizenship, I was 14 by the time we did.

On a coincidental side note, I was also told I’d be deported in elementary school – by my mom, who I got in a fight with.